by Tom Kratman
"Sent you back to try to rehire us for Pashtia, didn't they?" were the first words out of the Duque's mouth. "Good to see you, Virg," were the second set, uttered as Carrera stuck out a hand in friendship.
Rivers shook his head, then Carrera's hand. "How do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Predict things like that."
Carrera shrugged, then answered, "I keep up with the news. I also spy on the Army."
Yes, and you have enough friends in the Army—Marines, too, now, for that matter—to keep pretty up to date, too, don't you? Rivers thought.
"I meant what I said back in Sumer," Carrera continued. "The Progressives pissed me off royally. They're going to have to pay through the nose to get back in my good graces and get my troops into the war."
"I think they know that, Pat. That piece of filth undersecretary, O'Meara-Temeroso has been . . . let's say, offered up as a sacrifice."
"Was he? Good. Do they? Do they know how much?"
Carrera went to his desk, bent to a drawer and pulled out a file. From this he took a small spreadsheet and passed it over.
"That's what I need to re-establish something like control over the important parts of Pashtia, if I begin moving in three months. I'll only begin moving in three months if the FS hires me now."
He pulled out another sheet. "This is what it will cost next month." Another. "And the month after." Another. "And the month after that."
He pulled a fifth sheet out and handed it to Rivers. "And that's the penalty for trying to stiff me in Sumer."
"Jesus, Pat," Rivers said, more than half in shock. "We can't pay that. Congress would freak out."
Carrera smiled. "Oh, yes, you can. It will cost you a third of your gold reserves and that's the form I want it in. For that, you don't need congressional approval. The President owns it."
Rivers went from half shocked to fully so. Gold was . . . special. To give away a third of it . . . ? Sure, that asshole, Malcolm, mentioned gold, but I don't think he was serious.
"For that you get a small corps with the equivalent of twenty-six FSA combat battalions, with adequate combat support, service support and aviation, for a year," Carrera continued, "of which I guarantee two hundred and fifty days' of active campaigning. After that, if things work out, I can cut back both the scale and the intensity to the point that you won't have to pay all that much more than what it cost to keep a full legion in Sumer. Tell that orange-faced, windsurfing gigolo, Malcolm, that he can take it or pound sand. It makes no difference to me. Tell him I'll also have a list of various war materials the FSC will let me buy and intelligence and support they will provide or it's no deal.
"In addition, there is the matter of support to my naval forces . . . "
12/7/467 AC, Hamilton, FD
"Where the hell does this arrogant son of a bitch think he comes from?" asked Malcolm in a fine rhetorical rage. "Who the fuck does he think he is? Doesn't he know who the fuck I am?"
He thinks he's the only one who can save your bacon and the only one who both can and will provide troops willing to fight. He thinks that he has you over a barrel, thought Rivers, back in the SecWar's office. And he's right, too.
Rivers felt guilty—he really did—at the Progressive SecWar's discomfiture. He should be, he knew, more apolitical, even totally apolitical. Oh, well, tough shit; I despise the Progressives and I do enjoy watching the SecWar impotently rage.
In a repeat of Carrera's performance back on the Isla Real, Rivers took a sheet from a folder and passed it over. "This is what it will cost if we don't hire him now. And this," he continued, passing over another sheet, "is how much it will go up in two months. He didn't say so, Mr. Secretary, but I think that if the situation gets worse any faster than he has anticipated, these prices will go up even more."
14/7/467 AC, Panshir Base, Pashtia
In the military of most of the world, Class One supply—the most absolutely important class of supply—was food. And it was beginning to run short.
Marciano and his aide, Del Collea, stood outside the command bunker watching a heavy lift Taurcopter Civet stagger in under max load. This was no mean accomplishment with food, the chopper's main cargo, as food tended to cube out a carrier—to fill up its interior space—long before weighting it out. In this case, the Civet had another load slung underneath. Moreover, though it was not normal procedure, the Civet also carried a ton and a half of fuel.
Jets circled overhead. This was a futile attempt at intimidation of the guerillas who had Marciano's Tuscan Ligurini Brigade besieged. The pilots of the jet were under strict orders not to bomb lest civilians be hurt. Deep down, Marciano was beginning to wonder if the political masters in the Tauran Union to which his own country's politicians kowtowed weren't really more concerned that the Tauran forces not harm any of the guerillas. Certainly, the effect of not aggressively engaging the guerillas had been civilian deaths an order of magnitude greater than his forces would have inflicted if they'd gone hog-wild.
The chopper began a slow turn to the right, aligning itself with the short airfield. This was not, strictly speaking, necessary as the helicopter could simply hover in. That, however, burned fuel and fuel was becoming scarce, hence the mixed load.
Del Collea, younger and with better eyesight, saw the missiles first.
"Shit," he said, sotto voce.
"What?" Then Marciano saw them, too.
Two were fired. Only one hit. That one was enough. It impacted on the tail boom, severing the connection of tail rotor and transmission. The tail rotor immediately stopped spinning vertically which caused to Civet to immediately begin a horizontal spin. The pilot apparently tried to fight it but ended by losing all control over the helicopter. Quite possibly vertigo caused him to lose all control over himself, as well. Marciano and del Collea couldn't see that, though. They could, and did, see the helicopter go into a graceless, wavering, spiraling descent that ended in a very impressive—there was that cargo of fuel—fireball.
"Going to be short rations for a bit longer," del Collea muttered.
15/7/467 AC, Kashmir
Ashraf had imagined a long and dangerous trek to get from his guerilla company's area of operations to the school he was to attend. In fact, he'd lain awake for most of two nights, worrying about ambush, air attack, long marches and sleeping rough.
As it happened, Noorzad had simply given Ashraf's escort some money, and the two, plus some other ex-Haarlemers, had hopped a bus, gone to the Pashtian capital, Chabolo, and caught a flight to Kashmir's capital. From there, it was a simple taxi ride—oh, yes, with the usual forceful haggling—to the school. The school operated openly, making no pretense of hiding what it was.
After turning over his charges, Ashraf's escort had departed, leaving behind only some words of encouragement. Ashraf had been taken under the wing of his advisor, Majdy.
Majdy was, like Ashraf, Haarlem-born. They were about of an age. Indeed, most of the school's student body was in their early twenties. Moreover, most of the student body were "reverts;" Taurans or Columbians who had accepted Islam, and in particular the Salafi version of Islam, and then joined the jihad. If they shared any language it was typically English. Arabic, so that they could learn to read the Koran in its original sacred language, was a major part of the school's curriculum.
Until that time though, the students and their advisors—and there was an advisor for every student—would communicate in the common tongue or in their native language. Majdy, of course, also spoke Dutch.
"Did they feed you on the flight?" Majdy asked politely.
Ashraf grimaced. That was answer enough.
"Come then, Brother," Majdy said. "You must be hungry. There's no sense in going any further while your mind is on food."
With that, the advisor led off out of the dim reception area, through a green and white tiled garden courtyard, and toward a single story building from which came the enticing smell of food, well prepared.
Executive Mansion, Hamil
ton, FD, 17/7/467
The President was shocked. "He wants two thousand tons of gold? Two-fucking-thousand?"
Malcolm sighed. "He wanted two thousand, seven hundred, but has agreed to settle for two thousand plus the difference in FSD. Oh, and he wants the right to buy some things directly through our channels: radios, night vision equipment, some ordnance. Plus intelligence support."
"What? Not tanks and up-to-date aircraft?"
Again, Malcolm sighed. "When he insisted on the right to buy items that's what I thought he wanted. I offered, as a bargaining chip. But, no, the fucker's very happy with his mix of major equipment now. He only wants the radios for commonality and interoperability, and the ordnance and night vision because ours is incrementally better than what he can buy elsewhere."
The President scowled as if to say, If you had delivered the Taurans as you promised . . .
"Why gold?"
"It seems he's begun raising revenue by selling rights to the stuff to the rest of the world's very wealthy and very nervous. Based on what he's sold, against what we believe he's bought, he is overselling by quite a bit. I'm told that won't matter, as long as the price remains fairly stable and there's no run on his assets. I've got to warn you, Mr. President, that this much gold, if he uses it all to back his certificates, will make him completely independent and fully capable of waging war, or doing anything else he likes, completely on his own."
"How much of this is because we tried to cheat him?" the President asked.
"Maybe fifteen percent. It was a mistake, but with the press howling for blood it was perhaps an unavoidable mistake."
Malcolm's face grew thoughtful. "You know, Mr. President, we could hire a lot more troops from Latin Columbia and even western Taurus for this much money."
The President shrugged. "What would they do then? Insist on not being used for combat? Insist on being deployed someplace we don't need them? No non-Islamic government can stand the prospect of casualties anymore. They can't even stand the prospect of enemy casualties. And noncombatants? No, it's your fucking mercenaries or nobody."
Malcolm refrained from answering, Unfortunately, they're not my mercenaries.
19/7/467 AC, Quarters Number One, Isla Real
With Parilla retired and he and his wife now living in the Casa Linda for the duration of the Presidential campaign, Carrera had had a choice: leave the larger Quarters One unoccupied, which struck him as wasteful, move an underling into larger quarters than he had himself, which struck him as preposterous, turn Quarters One into a Bachelor Officers' Quarters, which struck him as altogether too noisy, or move in himself. He'd chosen the latter, and turned his old Quarters Two over to his favorite legion commander, Jimenez. It had been a toss up between Jimenez and Kuralski. The latter, however, had few social obligations while Jimenez had many.
One really pleasant side effects of having Jimenez for a neighbor was that the stunning Artemisia Jimenez, Xavier's niece, spent a fair amount of time—all the time she wasn't actively campaigning for Parilla—at Number Two, serving as her bachelor uncle's social host.
For his part, Jimenez was lost in the place. He had no family or, rather, his legion, the fourth, was his family. Still the mansion didn't go completely to waste as a very large number of junior officers tended to come by quite regularly whenever Artemisia was in residence.
"And so I ended up with a BOQ next door anyway," Carrera muttered, watching a half dozen of the horny bastards mowing Jimenez's yard while his niece looked on approvingly.
"What was that, Pat?"
"Nothing," Carrera answered Esterhazy. "Just thinking out loud. So what do you think about the gold?"
"Oh, wow!" Esterhazy answered, enthusiastically. "It's . . . well . . . Do you realize what this means, Pat?"
"Yeah, I do," Carrera answered. "You have enough gold for your precious metal certificate scheme even without invading the Legion's existing assets."
Esterhazy rolled his eyes. "Not just that, Pat. You're going to have enough gold to set up your own currency. You can pay your men with your own drachma, pay your bills with your own drachma, buy equipment, bribe, build—whatever the fuck you want to do—in honest-to-God, hard, backed currency. By the way, how much of the two thousand tons will we have to play with?"
"Not all," Carrera answered. "The FSD we're promised won't pay for the full campaign, though it will pay for most of it. We'll need to sell some gold."
"No!" Esterhazy objected. "Sell none of it, except as PMCs. I'm serious about that currency. We can get something designed and a print plant running in a few months."
"Fine. Go back to the FS—or do you think we should go through Taurus or Yamato?—to get it set up."
Esterhazy thought on that for a bit before answering, "I wouldn't trust the Taurans and the FSC's currency technology is . . . substandard, at best. Yamato, then, I think."
"Good. I agree. Denominations?"
"Mmm . . . I think we ought to keep with the drachma-equivalence everyone is used to; peg the value of the Legionary drachma to the Federated States drachma, at least initially."
Carrera thought about that for a moment "I suppose we can always drop equivalency if the FSD starts to drop or increase substantially."
"Whatever's more convenient or profitable," Esterhazy agreed. He was about to say something else when he suddenly stopped and began to laugh.
"What's so funny?" Carrera asked, with irritation.
Esterhazy immediately stopped laughing and explained. "Pat, it just hit me. With this, the Legion del Cid becomes sovereign, as much as any state on Terra Nova. You have your own army. You control your own territory, this island. You have a diplomatic branch, me. Now you're going to be coining your own money. I don't know that there are many, or any, attributes of sovereignty left. Nukes?"
Carrera didn't even think about answering that one honestly. Instead he said, "Well . . . now I have the money to add nuclear power to one of the Suvarov Class cruisers and refit it to support the classis."
21/7/467 AC, Mendoza Apartment, Ciudad Balboa
Jorge didn't have an answer. He was beginning to wonder if there was an answer. And if there was no answer to the question, then his entire project was false, a fraud.
The question? Simply put, it might be called, "My family or my country?"
"It's a basic question, 'Queli," Mendoza said aloud as he paced in a area in the living room that Marqueli ensured was always kept clear of obstruction for just that purpose. "And one that if I cannot answer it makes my whole thesis nonsense. I am insisting, just like that old book the Duque had translated, that morality must be rooted in the survival instinct or it's just a meaningless platitude. But I keep running into the problem that the survival instinct relates to either the self or to one's personal gene pool and has nothing to do with any artificial construct such as a country or a civilization. Those things only have moral meaning when they enhance the chances of the survival of oneself or one's genes. And both can require the sacrifice of either the self or the gene pool, so where does that leave me?"
"Sit, Jorge," the tiny wife ordered. Obediently, he paced to the couch and plopped himself down.
She patted him on the thigh affectionately then stood and went to the bookcase. From this, she drew a book of Old Earth poetry that Carrera had had translated and published. She opened it and scanned the index, then broke the book open to a particular page. From that page she read:
"For Romans, in Rome's quarrels,
Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife,
Nor limb nor life,
In the brave days of old."
"Sure," Jorge answered. "But so?"
"Those lines were about old Rome's best and bravest days. The lines that follow talk about the days that came, when people watched out for their own and to hell with their country. I am sure they thought . . . or felt, in any event . . . that they were doing right to care for their own, directly. But I want you to imagine, Husband, the descendants of
those old Romans, in the days of the Gothic sack. Imagine their sons slaughtered, their wives and daughters enslaved, raped and led off in chains, all the treasure hoarded by their ancestors stolen. Do you not think those later Romans, at that terrible moment, wouldn't have given anything they had if they could only undo the work of their ancestors who put family over country?"
"Perhaps they would have," Jorge conceded. "But it was too late, it is always too late, by the time people realize. And even so, that doesn't invalidate the objection to my thesis."
"Yes, Husband, it does. By your own words, isn't it ultimate survival we're talking about?"
"Yessss," he answered, warily.
"Fine. What does being in a state of nature, without civilization or patria, do to that?"
"It makes it 'nasty, brutal and short,'" Jorge answered, quoting Hobbes.
"Exactly," Marqueli agreed. And why should she not have recognized it? She'd basically taken Jorge's degree along with him. "And society—patria—enables us to make life something else, something less 'nasty, brutal and short.' In enhances the possibility, for nothing is a certainty, Jorge, that our gene pool will survive, does it not?"
"Sure," Jorge shrugged, "but the optimum is to have someone else sacrifice for the common good while preserving one's own gene pool."
"And then what happens?"
"Oh," he said, suddenly brightening.
"That's right," she said. "Then it becomes obvious, then common, then everyone guards their own and everyone ultimately loses."
"But couldn't one watch out for one's own and hide it?"
"Has that ever happened, Jorge? I mean in the long run? Doesn't it always come out, even if never openly admitted to? Doesn't it always begin with just one or two or a few . . . mmm . . . what was that term Professor Franco used?"